We felt them first. Fingers pressed to the rails, a dull rumble filled our hands and hummed into our arms before the cone of light, the great clatter

of metal against metal. Trestled high, above the bridge on Grand Avenue, we knew those tracks went on forever, between trees that lined the ties

like stations of the cross. The hill was forbidden but holy, thick with clover, ripe with berries in spring. The year I was nine, an April blizzard swept the

sky and we went to the trains in the dark. The wires strummed into sparks, the rails were a dazzle of shadows. Our faces — ghosts of our selves — reflected

in every train car window, lines of breath etched in passing glass. Above us, chimney smoke hung like smears of candle grease among the clouds.

We were grubby and poor, but we believed. We said our prayers, ate fish on Fridays, and never rode those trains. We could only kneel in something like

wonder, something like praise, and wait for the tracks’ reverent shudder. The memory is a gauzeengine that time blows through and keeps me small.

From What Matters (Welcome Rain Publishers, 2011)First Published in an Earlier Version in Paterson Literary ReviewRead by Nic Sebastian

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Twilight and What There Is

The gauze eyelid is gone and your spun glass hand. The past that always knew where to find you has lost its place. The ghosts have forgotten your name. There’s nothing left for the dead to remember—nothing catches up (there’s no meter running).

New grass lifts the field—bloodroot, bluebells, a thousand things so small and flawless they almost go unnoticed. Translation doesn’t escape you: you’re grateful for sunset’s watery rust and this, something instinctive called into being, more than perceived. More than memory, more than moment—nothing provisional. Anything you might say, might think, would be too much. You open your palms in a dusky Rorschach and let the dark fall through.

A stray dog laps the moon from a broken flowerpot. Silk hydrangeas bloom against the fence. A heron stands on the clothesline—bluer than blue—perched where (sky, earth) edges converge.

On the wall, the painting of a clock ticks, hands painted in at three forty-seven. She takes a wax apple from the bowl and peels it with a silver fruit knife. Sugared bread dries on the table. Across the room, a dimensional window masquerades as persuasion. If you believe it, it is.

From A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing at All (Welcome Rain Publishers, 2015)First Published in Ragazine, Volume 10, Number 2Read by Nic Sebastian